Deployment, maintenance and further development of SPATSIM-HDSF Volume 3: ACRU Agrohydrological Model

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Integrated water resources management (IWR) is a key requirement of the National Water Act of South Africa (Act 36 of 1998). This has created a need for IWR modelling. One aspect of IWR modelling is the development of hydrological modelling frameworks to facilitate the integration of models, providing a common data model and common data editing and analysis tools for use by a suite of models associated with the framework. Spatial and Time Series Modelling (SPATSIM)-Hydrological Decision Support framework (HDSF) is one such framework. This project has further developed and stabilised the restructured SPATSIM-HDSF developed as part of WRC Project K5/1490. An more important outcome has been the development of a comprehensive user manual and training of new and existing users. A National DWA RDM Database wasgenerated to faciltate the management of Reserve studies and the results that are generated by DWA. Many of these results are generated by different teams of consultants (service providers) and the full details of the studies have not always been archived (in many cases only the final results and a written report have been submitted to DWA). It has not always been a simple task to reproduce the results or to make changes based on new information, or to amend where management objectives for a specific river change. The SPATSIM-HDSF project has attempted to address this issue by providing a facility that can be used by DWA to manage the data used in and generated by Reserve studies. This report provides a facility for consultants to ‘check-out’ the most up-to-date version of the database with a unique identification code. Upon completion of the Reserve study, the consultant will then be required to ‘check-in’ their modified version of the database. The new facility allows DWA to run various integrity checks to ensure that the master database is not corrupted by errors or mistakes made by an individual consultancy team and that the master is only updated with
legitimate information appropriate to the specific Reserve study. The value of this new facility and how it will be used in practice still needs to be assessed and this can only be done once DWA start to use the system.
The incorporation of the ACRU agrohydrological model as one of the models available within the SPATSIM-HDSF modelling framework as part of WRC Project K5/1490, prompted a complete structuring of the structure of the model input files used to provide data to the ACRU model. This volume is about the structure of the ACRU model input files that have been further developed and stabilised. This project has also resulted in significant further development and improvement of the tools associated with the ACRU model, especially the Configuration Editor, but also the ACRU Menu Converter and SPATSIM-HDSF ACRU Interface. In addition this project has resulted in the development of a comprehensive user manual for the ACRU 4 modelling system and training of new and existing users of the model through two workshops.
Significant improvements to the SPATSIM-HDSF modelling framework and the ACRU 4 modelling system have been made, and both are now in use and have reached a stable stage of development. It is anticipated that new challenges in hydrological modelling will arise and that there will be new requests and suggestions from users for additional functionality.